The Quiet Beatle Remembered

Sunday News
Published: September 30, 2007
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

There's a scene in the famous rock n' roll mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap" in which a member of the band recounts his immersion in Eastern religion. The singer describes how his girlfriend helped sort out all the "bits of mysticism that drifted through my transom."

To which religion he has devoted himself, we are not told, but it somehow involves meditating while sticking out his tongue. The gag is clearly aimed at the many 1960s converts to Westernized versions of Buddhism, Hinduism and other fashionable "isms."

For most, it was a passing fad, often a drug-confused search for a meaning that rock n' roll stopped giving. But some stuck it out: Herbie Hancock remains a devout Buddhist, and Beach Boys great Mike Love still maintains that transcendental meditation can save the world. Up until his death in 2001, there was no greater example of Eastern religion's hold on 1960s rock n' roll royalty than George Harrison.

In his book, "Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison," Joshua M. Greene chronicles the steps on Harrison's path and shows how, in the face of death, Harrison reached peace with his god, his legacy and his mortality.

Harrison's music and life will be the subject of a multidisciplinary concert event at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4, at Elizabethtown College's Leffler Chapel and Performance Center. The event is free, but seating is limited and will be offered on a first- come, first-served basis.

The Godfrey Townsend Band will perform music from throughout Harrison's career with the aid of film and photos, performance clips and interviews. Greene will serve as narrator. The event comes amid news that Martin Scorsese will direct a documentary about Harrison's life with the participation of his widow, Olivia.
In 1965, Harrison became enamored of Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar.

After immersion in the rites of Indian music, he became further intrigued by the spiritual roots of the music. What followed was a lifelong devotion to the Hare Krishna movement of Hinduism, which suggests that chanting the names of God in a mantra will bring the devotee to a conscious awareness of God. In "Here Comes the Sun," Greene, a professor of religion at Hofstra University and a Krishna devotee, limits his discussion of the Beatles to their conflicts instead of the revolutionary music the four men made together.

Even if they weren't chanting mantras, much of the Beatles' best music sought the same kind of awareness and healing that Harrison sought daily. When people point to the spiritual and cultural awakenings initiated by artists of the 1960s, they reference the Beatles as a group, not as individuals.

Among Greene's sins, he dismisses Lennon's "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite," a landmark of predigital production and perhaps the genesis of the sampling and tape-looping techniques that drive pop and hip-hop today, as hackneyed and throwaway. He has only kind words for Ringo Starr, it seems, but paints Paul McCartney and Lennon as cruel, insensitive, litigious and domineering.

His discussion of Harrison's cribbing from "He's So Fine" on the otherwise wonderful "My Sweet Lord" is given only two paragraphs and is described as an annoyance. Greene never even mentions the song was sung by the Chiffons. He gives much emphasis to how Harrison's contributions as a songwriter were overlooked by the Lennon-McCartney team (not really a team at all; they hardly ever wrote together) until he began using Indian music on tracks such as "Within You Without You" and "Love You Too."

But Greene's book is not a Beatles book; it's about Harrison's personal journey, and in that regard it is a success. It could well serve as a guide for others looking to discover what the working- class boy from dreary post-War Liverpool found on the banks of the Ganges River.

Greene shows that as much as Harrison's life was enriched by his religious devotion, it was not without hazards. In 1974, Harrison undertook a tour that proved to be a critical nightmare, as his heavy-handed preaching drove away legions of fans who wanted to hear Beatles hits.

Harrison also went through a period when he questioned much of the Krishna doctrine and became estranged from his first wife, Patti Boyd, to the point that she took up with his best mate, Eric Clapton. (In the end, an enlightened Harrison seemed cool with it.) Through it all, Harrison found true peace when cancer began to take away his life. "Still Krishna after all these years," he proudly shouted with friends on a 1996 pilgrimage to India.

In the end, according to those closest to him, he found what he was looking for and, ultimately, what we are all looking for, whether we find it in God, or rock n' roll, or both, or neither. Said his son Dahni, "He was not afraid of death."